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publication of a large number of woodblock prints, booklets, novels and
articles, which brought the exotic ‘other’ closer to the Japanese public. 52
Despite the contempt with which meat eating had been regarded in Japan,
the association with Westerners began to bolster its image. As the volume
of international trade increased, the number of Japanese who socialized
with Western traders rose and with it the opportunities for them to taste
Western (meat) dishes.
These circumstances propelled the rise of a beef-eating fashion
among progressive Japanese, a fashion that drew inspiration from the
Western dietary habits, but relied heavily on the tradition of ‘beast restaurants’.
The new trend emerged in the mid-1860s and took a form of gyūnabe,
a beef stew that was prepared in a similar manner to the way game used to
be cooked – stewed with miso or soy sauce. Like many other fashions of premodern
Japan, gyūnabe emerged as an expression of the free spirit of urban
culture, embraced at first by ‘disagreeable ruffians of the type who liked to
brag that they had eaten meat’. 53
In 1871 the playwright Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) published an
illustrated book of monologues entitled Aguranabe (‘Sitting around the
Stewpan’), a satirical portrayal of the new fashion. In his analysis of
Aguranabe John Mertz explains that to eat beef meant ‘to momentarily
set outside of the realm of social significations that had infused life in
“Edo”, and to participate in the new cosmopolitan sphere of “Tokyo”’. 54
Following Mertz’s argument, we may claim that meat eating played a
role in breaking up the hierarchical social structure of the Tokugawa
period and in constructing a modern world-view among the Japanese
masses. One of the personages, ‘a young man fond of the West’, declares
the following:
Excuse me, but beef is certainly a most delicious thing, isn’t it?
Once you get accustomed to its taste, you can never go back to
deer or wild boar again. I wonder why we in Japan haven’t
eaten such a clean thing before? . . . We really should be grateful
that even people like ourselves can now eat beef, thanks to the
fact that Japan is steadily becoming a truly civilized country.
Of course, there are some unenlightened boors who cling to
their barbaric superstitions and say that eating meat defiles you
so much that you can’t pray any more before the Buddha and
the gods. Such nonsense shows they simply don’t understand
natural philosophy. . . . In the West, they’re free of superstition.
There it’s the custom to do everything scientifically, and
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